A sketch of that progress in the science of chemistry alone would be
the subject of his address. The initial point was the views of Dalton
and his contemporaries compared with the ideas which now prevail; and
he (the president) examined this comparison by the light which the
research of the last fifty years had thrown on the subject of the
Daltonian atoms, in the three-fold aspect of their size,
indivisibility, and mutual relationships, and their motions.